The Quiet Truth About the Green Revolution: We’re Using More Oil, Not Less

Twenty years later, the pumpjacks outside Midland continue to nod in the same sluggish rhythm. The same flares burn against the same Texas sky, the same trucks rumble down the same dusty service roads, and an executive is probably still being asked when the music will stop somewhere in a Houston boardroom. The odd thing is that no one has a definitive response in 2026. Solar power has skyrocketed. Sales of EVs continue to rise. Coal should be eligible for a wake because it has been pronounced dead so many times. However, the world’s oil consumption has risen above 100 million barrels per day and is not expected to decline.

The term “additive transition” has become more common among analysts. Instead of taking the place of oil, renewable energy sources are merely adding to it. The world just needs more energy of all kinds. These economies—China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Nigeria—are not reducing their consumption to make way for more environmentally friendly options. Power plants, highways, plastics factories, air conditioners, motorcycles, and refineries are all being scaled up simultaneously. The curve may eventually bend. We may have been telling ourselves that tale for longer than we’d like to acknowledge.

Economists identified something in the 19th century that contributes to the paradox’s enduring nature. William Stanley Jevons observed that Britain ended up burning more coal rather than less as steam engines became more efficient. Today, the same dynamic is subtly at work. Fracking reduced the cost of oil. Petrochemicals became more affordable due to lower oil prices. Plastic packaging, synthetic fibers, fertilizers, and a thousand other industrial inputs became even more affordable thanks to cheaper petrochemicals. It turns out that efficiency has a tendency to reinforce the very habit it was meant to break. Observing all of this gives the impression that the engineers prevailed while the climate negotiators are still attempting to determine the scoreboard.

The geopolitical aspect complicates matters. Governments resorted to fossil fuels when the Strait of Hormuz momentarily closed earlier this year and Brent surged above $100. Stockpiles were refilled. Quiet reprieves were granted to coal plants that were supposed to retire. Climate commitments were pushed to the back of the agenda rather than completely abandoned. A state of energy emergency was proclaimed in the Philippines. Negotiations over LNG, which Europe had vowed to stop years earlier, were resumed. When it truly materializes, energy security has the ability to overshadow nearly everything.

The alternative isn’t straightforward either, which makes this problematic for the transition narrative. Lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, and a long list of rare earths, whose supply chains pass through some of the world’s most unstable areas, are in high demand by the clean-energy economy. By 2040, the demand for minerals is expected to almost quadruple. Steel, cement, ships, and diesel trucks are needed to build wind farms and battery plants, all of which uncomfortably depend on the same hydrocarbons that we are attempting to leave behind. Ironically, the route away from oil now passes through more of it.

This does not imply that the transition is failing. The price of solar energy is still declining. Compared to most predictions made ten years ago, battery storage is improving more quickly. In China, EVs are now the norm rather than a curiosity. The world is changing, but not in the neat, straightforward manner that the slide decks originally implied. Because the world economy doesn’t follow a schedule, oil isn’t peaking on time. Momentum, contracts, infrastructure, and the minor daily choices made by roughly eight billion people power it. As of right now, the majority of those choices still involve a barrel at some point in the chain.